The Hunger for Shape, and: Deer Tracks on Snow

The Hunger for Shape (Géraldine O'Connor's last interview) Oranges make me Cezanne, potatoes Van Gogh. Everything thrives, even the dead. The sky floats more than O'Keeffe's white skulls. A child, I'd consume books on the plague. The carts stacked with corpses, rattling through streets where black rats roamed, filled me with dread that's the essence of mysticism. I carry my husband inside me, I think. Each morning I wake to the memory of his face: bones, shadows, eyes. Alive, he craved warm, pale shapes: my vulva and breasts, the sun through a scrim. Such beauty in stillness. Black moons float on my refrigerator rack. On withering oranges, skin puckers so quietly a fetus might be dying. When we buried our baby, her forehead wasn't collapsed but elegantly sensual, round as a saint's. At the moment of demise, oranges sag from the outside in, a splendor in decay everything, I swear, revels in: look at the refrigerator's second shelf, at the bread with its beard of mold. 231 It's autumn in this refrigerator, a toxic season, true, but I never keep anything long past its prime, simply witness stages that fill me with joy: the taut, firm fruit evolves into shapes lifespan and gravity stamp. At night, in bed, bluelit embryos grow in my brain to darker maturity. Then I remember: I hated that home. During visiting hours, I'd show him my sculptures. He'd stroke the white fetuses' fingers, whispering. So gentle, loving— I'd hold his hands for hours, cradle his head on my lap. Each day of his dying we'd celebrate how he evolved. Terri Brown-Davidson University of Nebraska, Lincoln 232 Deer Tracks on Snow seedy with red-gold leaves. The little lips awkwardly beautiful so I stoop in my robe, push fingers in. House-whispers behind me. Absent-bird din. I imagine they're dead, know they're not, having seen them snap their flock out suddenly like a net of black wire against the shock of blue sky, the net borne stiffly off while, too stupid to breathe, slippered on snow, I crouched suspended beneath. The bleeding head. Eyes sick with light. I slid from the car, her long legs jerking. I want to tell you how naked I felt. How useless my grief, petty as the celebratory breaths I drew finally for birds that would migrate with or without my urging. On that doe I struck, flecks of white glazed dark iris, the whole eyeball, its thickening ice, the shimmering dimming blackening road, transparent. Opaque. Terri Brown-Davidson University of Nebraska, Lincoln 233 ...